Sales operations is the unsung hero of the sales world. Its role is far-reaching and yet is critical for frontline reps and for your revenue's health as a whole.
As a sales ops leader, the scope of the role can be overwhelming, but don’t worry. We’ve compiled a list of five must-read books for sales operations leaders to help you support your sales team with day-to-day tactics or a winning long-term strategy.
Sales Engagement: How The World's Fastest Growing Companies are Modernizing Sales Through Humanization at Scale
The modern buyer has tons of information, can come from different mediums, and has more options to choose from than ever before. This unique sales landscape makes sales ops, and supporting your sales team, extremely difficult.
Sales Engagement is the first step towards differentiating yourself and connecting with your prospects. Understanding engagement and the principles behind it is vital for supporting your team, getting them leads, and knowing the best next step when they do book that first meeting.
The book, by Manny Medina, Max Altschuler, and Mark Kosoglow, explores why a sales engagement strategy is so important, taking you step by step to connect with your prospect at every stage.
You’ll also learn specific tactical tips including:
- Using channel optimization to fix common problems
- Using personas to humanize sales
- Using A/B testing the right way to transform your messaging for maximum connection
With contributions from sales veterans like Trish Bertuzzi, Ralph Barsi, Mark Roberge, Craig Rosenberg, Jill Konrath, Jeb Blount, Anthony Iannarino and many more, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more important sales book to optimize your process and engage with customers.
This book is a must have for any sales operations leader.
The Sales Development Playbook: Build Repeatable Pipeline and Accelerate Growth with Inside Sales
If you want to grow your pipeline and your business as a whole, sales development is the answer. Sales development and building new leads is key to effectively guiding the direction of your revenue teams, properly forecasting, and creating a winning system from start to finish.
In this book, Trish Bertuzzi uses her three decades of practical, hands-on experience to teach you the six elements of growing your pipeline and accelerating revenue growth:
- Aligning your sales development model with the buyer's journey
- Segmenting your prospect universe to specialize your tools and messaging
- A winning hiring process
- Motivating, engaging, and developing people to boost retention
- Crafting buyer-based messaging
- Quota setting, measuring what matters, and acceleration technologies
The Sales Development Playbook covers almost everything you need to know to be a success in sales ops. So, make sure you clear a spot on your bookshelf for it.
The Market-Driven Supply Chain: A Revolutionary Model for Sales and Operations Planning in the New On-Demand Economy
The Market-Driven Supply Chain by Robert Burrows III takes a comprehensive approach to succeeding in today’s on-demand environment. It has plenty of tools, tips, and case studies to ensure your customers remain loyal and your sales people stay prepared.
You’ll learn how to:
- Use robust analytics for conducting value segmentations and simulation analyses
- Develop a customer-centric culture and a collaborative organizational structure
- Dynamically rebalance the inventory mix to improve capacity and reduce costs
- Retool twenty-six management processes to achieve a market-savvy SOP
This book is more than your typical sales ops “how-to.” It looks at your organization as a whole so you get a bird's eye view of how sales and your role, interacts with the company as a whole. One of the most important things sales ops does is develop processes for the sales teams, and this book helps you do that.
Lightning Sales Ops: Building Salesforce for Sales Development Teams
Sales development is an important arm of sales operations, and in recent years, it has emerged as a critical lever for revenue growth. Many consider it to be the most important sales process innovation in the last decade.
For all the hype, there hasn’t been much progress in how SDRs interact with the tools you already have, such as Salesforce.
This book, by Matt Bertuzzi, will show you how to improve the way Salesforce works for your SDRs so that they can do their jobs easier and more efficiently.
Using engaging stories and case studies, this book will teach you the strategies you need to streamline your sales processes and boost productivity.
Even if you don’t use Salesforce, the principles in this book can apply to a number of CRMs, and will help you improve the quality of life for your Sales development team.
The Sales Enablement Playbook
Sales enablement focuses on providing sales reps with the tools and content they need to make the sale. These are principles that every sales operations leader should know.
Written by sales veterans Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey, this book provides insights into creating a culture of sales enablement throughout your organization. You’ll learn real-world tactics and frameworks that you can begin implementing immediately, regardless of company size or industry.
Whether enablement is part of your role or not, it’s something that you need to be supporting, and The Sales Enablement Playbook will help you identify your role in a thriving enablement ecosystem.
